Into the Wild

Director: Sean Penn
Cast: Emile Hirsch, William Hurt, Catherine Keener, Vince Vaughan

This traces the couple of years that Christopher McCandless (Hirsch — reminiscent of a young Leonardo diCaprio, only with talent and charisma) spent on the road in the US before his death from starvation in an abandoned bus in Alaska.

Despite being based on true events, the film is really magical realism: McCandless is an improbably insightful and winsome character, his encounters with people magnified and beatified by his early death.

This will annoy some people no end: why is he shown in such a positive light? He’s so self-absorbed, so selfish, so idiotic! (The film omits some facts that reveal how easy it would have been for him to survive.)

But the Romantic in me soared as I watched this film. This is due in no small part to the magnificent framing of the varied American landscape, and to the skilfully played, intimate characterizations that Penn has crafted. This sounds dull, but the true events and characters have been moulded to create an engaging pacing to match the emotional arc.

McCandless is someone who has faced the emptiness of much of his culture, and spurned it for the subversive naturalism and spiritualism of Romanticism’s heirs: Tolstoy, Thoreau, London, the beat poets.

However flawed an icon McCandless is, there is something in his story that should call out the wild in all of us, just a little.

Atonement

Director: Joe Wright
Cast: James McAvoy, Keira Knightley, Romola Garai, Brenda Blethyn

Let me say it up front: I haven’t read the book, and I just don’t get the hype. Don’t get me wrong: there’s no question this is an above-average film. There’s some really superb camera work, most memorably an extraordinary one-shot that situates us in the chaos of the Dunkerque evacuation.

I also loved some of the narrative devices at the beginning — scenes are retold from different characters’ perspectives, establishing an irony that pays off later on.

Moreover, there are the solid performances you’d expect from this cast, and even some pleasant surprises (especially from the various incarnations of Briony). There's some exquisite costuming, a value-adding score and extremely clever soundtrack, and some very tense set-pieces.

But the whole didn't hang together for me. I think this is primarily because I just didn't believe enough in the lovers , Robbie and Cecilia (McAvoy and Knightley). Attractive and charismatic as both these actors can be, I just didn't know enough about their characters’ history to feel acutely the pain of their separation.

Once again I’ll fly in the face of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association®, and declare it to be a film worth watching, but not this year’s best drama!

Rendition

Director: Gavin Hood

Cast: Jake Gyllenhaal, Omar Metwally, Reese Witherspoon

The US’s practice of kidnapping and torturing terrorism suspects is important enough to be brought to the American mainstream, but this is not really the film to do it. Despite some engaging performances (particularly from two young ‘North African’ lovers), it’s impossible to overlook the fact that the dialogue is sometimes painfully preachy, and the whole set-up is far too hokey.

The victim of the rendition, El-Ibrahimi (Metwally), is clearly not a terrorist: he’s lived in the US for a long time; he’s attended a top-school; he’s married to muppet-faced soccer-mom Isabella (Witherspoon); he doesn’t even have a beard or a funny hat. Meanwhile, fresh-faced pencil-pusher Freeman (Gyllenhaal) is simply not the kind of man we could ever imagine being chosen to observe an interrogation — he’s precisely too fair-minded and liable to spill the story to the press.

All of this simplifies the moral categories: it’s the story of a good, innocent man facing an egregious injustice. We really need to ask ourselves: even if someone is collaborating with terrorists, do we have the right to imprison him without trial and torture him?

Is that really how best to defend our democracy?

Garage

Director: Leonard Abrahamson
Cast: Pat Shortt, Conor Ryan

An unassuming film that came out at Cannes and has no release date in Australia as yet, the shorts promised me that Garage would be the IrishKenny, with a petrol station substituting for a portaloo convention.

And there are certainly elements of this: Josie (Shortt) is a steady, craic-loving, heart-of-gold, small-town bowser attendant who prides himself on giving the punters ‘valet service’ when he fills their tanks, and whose idea of growing the business extends to putting a stand of Castrol oils out the front of the shop.

The laughs come pretty regularly for the first hour or so, with quietly hilarious dialogue and a masterful physical performance from Shortt. He’s ably supported by Ryan, playing David, Josie’s slightly awkward young off-sider.

As we watch Josie and David’s relationship blossom, we delight to see Josie’s crescent confidence bleed out into other areas of his life, and we’re all set for a feel-good ending.

What we get, however, is a disturbing and haunting wrong-footing — the kind of thing that is ultimately more satisfying than the sentimentalism of films like The Full Monty or Billy Elliot, even if it ends up being far less bankable.

Gone Baby Gone

Director: Ben Affleck
Writers: Ben Affleck and Aaron Stockard, from the novel by Dennis Lehane
Starring: Casey Affleck, Michelle Monaghan, Ed Harris, Morgan Freeman, Amy Ryan
Running time: 114 minutes

Plot: Private detectives Patrick Kenzie (Affleck) and Angie Gennaro (Monaghan) are called to investigate the disappearance of a four-year-old girl. As they delve the background of her drug-addicted mother (Ryan), they are drawn into a world of dealers, pedophiles, and corrupt cops which puts at risk the detectives’ relationship and their very lives.

Lehane penned the novel behind 2003’s Mystic River, and Gone Baby Gone initially seems to be retreading familiar territory: again, the setting is down-and-out Boston; again, the key plot moments revolve around investigating the abuse of children, which lends the whole an extremely grim tone that will sicken most sensible viewers.

But the plot is in a sense secondary to Gone Baby Gone, because at its heart is a character study and some probing queries about the relationship between law and morality. The film rises or falls on how much the viewer believes in Kenzie’s character arc, and how much we engage in the choices he faces.

For mine, the film establishes these concerns well, and gives us enough time to see the horror of Kenzie’s moral questions and therefore connect with (or revile) his decisions. Praise must go here to Ben Affleck, who seems to have handled his first (serious) directorial effort very well. On reflection, the plot seems to develop a little too easily at points (some characters cough up more simply than we might expect; we wonder if other solutions might not have been found; some actions seem to lack the expected consequences). But the key scenes are tight and tense, the ending is superbly ambiguous, and throughout best use is made of the excellent cast.

In particular, Casey Affleck effects a mixture of fresh-faced vulnerability and sharp-witted hardman that allows us to believe he could do the job of wringing information out of the Boston lowlifes who would never talk to the police. This performance can only bolster any Oscar hopes for his Robert Ford. Meanwhile, Monaghan injects Gennaro with enough girl-next-door sense and empathy that she becomes the touchstone of ‘normalcy’ for us in the maelstrom that consumes the detectives’ lives.

Verdict: Tense and thought-provoking, this is one of my favourite films for this year. It is, however, very dark — much darker than the French 12+ rating would suggest! I look forward to more of the Afflecks in this mode: the senior behind and the junior in front of the camera.